dothinks.com

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

It's the economy, stupide!

Politics didn't listen to the ecologists and scientists who have been warning us about climate change and its environmental, social and economic costs for more than 2 decades.

Here is the last chance: listen to the guys who deal with the money !!!

Maybe this is what Tony Blair thinks, might be the last strategy to convince everybody - especially the corporate business world - to start fighting seriously against the ongoing climate crisis (in the UK they have started to grow wine and olive trees on the South coast...). So here are the what Mr. Stern - a former World bank economist - tells the British governement about what to expect economy-wise from the impacts of global warming:

extreme weather could reduce global gross domestic product (GDP) by up to 1%

A two to three degrees Celsius rise in temperatures could reduce global economic output by 3%

If temperatures rise by five degrees Celsius, up to 10% of global output could be lost. The poorest countries would lose more than 10% of their output

In the worst case scenario global consumption per head would fall 20%

To stabilise at manageable levels, emissions would need to stabilise in the next 20 years and fall between 1% and 3% after that. This would cost 1% of GDP

In a recent interview I did with Isabel Hilton, founder of the web projectchinadialogue.net,for the december issue of "if...", we talked about whether there was still time to make sure China's development would be sustainable instead of ading to the global warming. Her aswer was quite clear:

"I think we are running out of time. The next ten to fifteen years are absolutely critical in terms of the measures that need to be taken to avoid really catastrophic climate change. The Chinese are caught between the need for development and the need to take care of the environment. I think until five years ago, the attitude was pretty much “develop first and think of the environment later”. That has certainly changed. The crisis is now so visible that the government has become convinced of the need to do both: to develop sustainable, to build in much stricter environmental impact assessments. Making that happen across China is a challenge of governance and that’s a whole other side of issues: how you turn this oil tanker around… "